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Introduction: RethinkingScience and Religion

James D. Proctor

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.—Albert Einstein

Prolegomenon: “Science”? “Religion”?

Is science without religion lame, and religion without science blind?Einstein’s famous statement1 finds many supporters: here, at last,the conflict between science and religion is laid to rest, and both areupheld for their different yet mutually supporting roles. Others,however, may be less enthusiastic with Einstein’s proposition thatreligion is necessary to give legs to science, or science to give eyes toreligion. For them, the issue is indeed one of science versus reli-gion, reason versus faith, realism versus idealism, matter versusspirit. Still others may wish Einstein had made the stronger state-ment that science and religion are parallel quests revealing similartruths. To this group of people, declaring science and religion to beseparate but equal is to miss their metaphysical common ground.Reminiscent of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” then, some mayfind Einstein’s position to be just right, while others may find it tobe too hot or too cold.

This volume reconsiders these and other major positions on therelationship between science and religion. But a fundamental ques-tion underlies any such position: what is meant by science and byreligion? Einstein’s argument is illustrative. In the same text wherethe above statement is found, Einstein defines science as “the century-


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old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptiblephenomena of this world into as thoroughgoing an association as possible.”2

Yet, he argues, “The scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond howfacts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. . . . [K]nowledge of what isdoes not open the door directly to what should be.”3 And this is how Einsteinconveniently defines religion, stating “To make clear these fundamental endsand valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual,seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to per-form in the social life of man.”4

The literature on defining science and religion is immense and not ame-nable to concise review—certainly not within the space of this introduction.As one would imagine, there are lumpers and splitters, those who discover aunity to science or to religion and those who stridently dispute such a unity.What is important here is to note that Einstein’s argument is utterly dependenton his definitions: if, indeed, science and religion are defined as unitary (sci-ence is about this; religion is about that) and complementary (in this case,science is about facts, religion about values, and the two need each other), thenthere is no other possible way to imagine their relationship.

Definitions of science and religion are inextricably bound to any positionone encounters concerning the relationship between science and religion.There is no such thing as some neutral point of beginning from which we maycompare alternative arguments, as these arguments necessarily concern notonly the relationship between science and religion, but their essential identityas well. We thus hopehe fresh perspectives we offer in this volume on therelationship between science and religion will reinvigorate discussion over fun-damental questions concerning the nature of science and of religion—ques-tions that go far beyond their relevance here.

Science and Religion: One or Two?

The range of possible positions regarding the relationship between science andreligion has been formalized by Ian G. Barbour in a well-known typology.5

Barbour identifies four types: Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integra-tion. Conflict theorists would find Einstein’s position too “hot” (i.e., too sup-portive of science/religion compatibility). Einstein’s position itself may be readas Independence, with science and religion understood as separate enterprises,or stronger interpretations of this position may lead to Dialogue, examiningthe mutual dependence between science and religion. Lastly, Integration the-orists would read Einstein as much too “cold” for their tastes, which desire anessential similarity between science and religion.

Though useful, Barbour’s typology has been criticized as static, over-generalized, and ahistoric—a limitation of many typologies.6 One could per-


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haps improve upon Barbour by moving toward greater complexity, as doesWillem Drees in a ninefold schema;7 but I would like to suggest an even sim-pler typology into which many positions on science and religion could beplaced. It derives from Barbour’s typology as well as the work of Harold Oliver,8

and focuses not on science and religion per se., but rather the assumed do-mains onto which they map.

There are two underlying models for many positions on science and reli-gion: a one-domain, or monistic, model, and a two-domain, or dualistic, model.In the one-domain model, science and religion either vie for the same turf(following Barbour’s Conflict type and Oliver’s Conflict Theory) or work har-moniously in the same arena (Barbour’s Integration type). In the two-domainmodel, science and religion occupy distant worlds (Barbour’s Independencetype, or Oliver’s Compartment Theory) or close but different worlds (Barbour’sDialogue type); in both cases science and religion are at peace because theyare somewhat separable. Let us call the one-domain models conflict and con-vergent monism, respectively, and the two-domain model conciliatory dualism.

The story often begins with conflict monism, a battle between science andreligion built on the one-domain model. Here science and religion play therole of dueling outlaws in a Wild West town that’s not big enough for the bothof ’em. Conflict monism has its modern roots in late-nineteenth-centurypublications such as J. W. Draper’s 1875 History of the Conflict between Religionand Science and A. D. White’s 1895 History of the Warfare of Science with The-ology in Christendom,9 yet retains continued popularity among those who fearreligion is treading on the toes of science or vice versa. Perhaps the best con-temporary example, at least in the case of the United States, involves competingaccounts of the origin of life: the evolution versus creation controversy.10 Here,as the caricature goes, theistic and naturalistic accounts are inevitably at oddsover how living things—especially humans—came to be.

The broader issue in many accounts of conflict monism is the validity ofreligion in its claims on reality. Consider the biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich,in their book Betrayal of Science and Reason:

In the United States today, a surprising number of people believe inhoroscopes, “out-of-body” experiences, the magical powers of crys-tals, and visitors from space. Our society is also witnessing a resur-gence of creationism. . . . Such beliefs, and the activities they inspire,threaten rational scientific inquiry by rejecting the methods and pro-cedures . . . that characterize modern science.11

Yet conflict monism can equally challenge the validity of science and sci-entific rationalism. Consider the statement of Prince Charles:

The idea that there is a sacred trust between mankind and our Crea-tor, under which we accept a duty of stewardship for the earth, has


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been an important feature of most religious and spiritual thoughtthroughout the ages. . . . It is only recently that this guiding princi-ple has become smothered by almost impenetrable layers of scien-tific rationalism. . . . If literally nothing is held sacred anymore—be-cause it is considered synonymous with superstition or in someother way “irrational”—what is there to prevent us treating our en-tire world as some “great laboratory of life” with potentially disas-trous long term consequences?12

How can it be that the Ehrlichs strongly support rationalism and PrinceCharles strongly opposes it? Perhaps the issue is not with rationalism per se,but rather with the domain onto which rationalism is applied. Prince Charles’speech addressed sustainable development and the fate of the earth; but hisprimary concern was with our attitudes toward nature, and where we shouldturn for moral guidance in these matters. Perhaps Prince Charles would agreethat science and scientific rationalism are fine methods to get at the structureof the objective world; but when we get to our subjective selves, our values andattitudes, then science is ill-equipped to help, and can in fact hurt if it displacesspirituality as a moral resource. In its claims on the objective world, science isfine, but in the domain of the self, religion and spirituality are crucial. We hearin Prince Charles’ assertion the broader, well-known religious critique of sec-ularism and its threat to the soul.

If this is how the battle is perceived, if religion treads on science’s domainwhen it makes pronouncements on the nature of reality, whereas science treadson religion’s domain when it becomes the preeminent guide for the self, thenthere is a ready solution to conflict monism: separate the two. It is thus in thecontext of conflict monism that Einstein’s statement makes sense. His char-acterization of science, religion, and their relationship is a familiar one, builton a quasi-metaphysical distinction between the continent of Facts on the onehand, which point directly to reality, and the continent of Values on the other,which point back to the self. This is precisely the path taken by the late Harvardpaleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who in his book Rocks of Ages argues thatscience and religion are noble, valid, but essentially different paths distin-guished by their respective fact- and value-based domains of authority, whichGould terms “non-overlapping magisteria” or NOMA.13 (The title of his bookcomes from the old joke: science tells us about the ages of rocks; religion tellsus about the Rock of Ages.)

Einstein and Gould represent conciliatory dualism, an attempt to reconcilescience and religion, to grant them both validity, by casting each into its ownseparable domain. Let the scientists deal with facts about the world; let thereligious leaders help us to clarify the values by which we live in the world.Perhaps they need each other (as Einstein admits more forthrightly thanGould), but they are certainly different.



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But there is another approach that repudiates both conflict monism andconciliatory dualism by seeking a solution where science and religion, realityand self, come into harmony. Indeed, perhaps the biggest business in scienceand religion today builds on the theme of convergent monism, where sci-ence and religion offer coherent claims on reality and the self. Consider new-age thinkers such as Ken Wilber, who promises in his book The Marriage ofSense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion:

From the depths of a Kosmos too miraculous to believe, from theheights of a universe too wondrous to worship, from the insides ofan astonishment that has no boundaries, an answer begins to sug-gest itself, and whispers to us lightly. If we listen very carefully,from within this infinite wonder, perhaps we can hear the gentlepromise that, in the very heart of the Kosmos itself, both scienceand religion will be there together to welcome us home.14

Wilber’s cosmology reconnects matter and spirit—and hence, the realitiesto which science and religion point—in a manner hearkening back to the GreatChain of Being.15 Other convergence accounts have a more mainstream ringand respectability, but at minimum suggest a belief in the unity of science andreligion in their claims on reality, if not a new vision of self. Mathematicalphysicist Paul Davies introduces his Mind of God, for instance, by stating:

Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and morestrongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuityso astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. Theremust, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation. Whether onewishes to call that deeper level “God” is a matter of taste and defini-tion.16

Convergent monism has captured the attention of many people lookingfor a resolution to the cognitive dissonance of conflict monism without sepa-rating science from religion as in conciliatory dualism. A brief glance at scienceand religion titles in bookstores suggests the huge popularity of this conver-gence message. In my hometown of Santa Barbara, a recurrent lecture seriescalled Mind/Supermind features many of these authors: one recent seriesended with Fritjof Capra of Tao of Physics fame.17

This approach to science and religion thus elides the distinction betweenthe universe and the self: here, science speaks to the soul, and religion speaksof deeper truths about reality. In this sense, convergent monism is a thor-oughgoing monism, whereas conflict monism is a sort of inattentive monism,one that has placed the whole battle onto the domain of either the object orthe subject, but never both.

How are we to make sense of monistic and dualistic treatments of scienceand religion? What should be apparent after brief reflection is that both offer


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a naıve taxonomy of the underlying domains upon which science and religionare founded. Consider dualism: can the domains of science and religion be soeasily separated? Anyone who tries to assert that facts and values are readilyseparable, and that science has nothing to do with the latter and religion noth-ing to do with the former, is conjuring purified apparitions of both. So, then,is monism vindicated? Only by a similar simplification of science and reli-gion—in this case with unificationist aspirations—and by the creation of asingle domain stretching from you to the universe, one so vast as to be arguablymeaningless. Perhaps, indeed, the universe and the self are one at some level,but only by squinting out all the important and interesting details.

Enter the Human Experience

With only two entities under consideration, it is perhaps understandable thatscience and religion are often discussed in terms of monistic or dualistic mod-els: after all, the basic logic of comparison between two entities is samenessand difference, one or two. Yet, what if a third element is added? This is,analogically, the very problem Henri Poincare entertains in the classic state-ment of chaos in celestial mechanics.18 The relative orbits of two celestial bod-ies—say, the Earth and the Sun—are stable and the solution predictable (in-deed, it was completely worked out centuries ago by Newton). When a thirdbody is introduced (e.g., the classic problem of Jupiter, Earth, and the Sun),however, the situation is shown by Poincare to be enormously complex andmathematically insoluble. Poincare, a genius in several mathematical and sci-entific fields, had entered a contest sponsored by the king of Sweden that beganin 1887, in which one question necessitated demonstrating that the solar sys-tem’s dynamic stability could be proven by means of Newtonian mechanics.Poincare’s failure to do so nonetheless so impressed the judges that he wasdeclared the winner: what Poincare effectively demonstrated was the impos-sibility of solving the three-body problem, or in other words the inevitability ofchaotic behavior. The well-known characteristic of sensitivity to initial condi-tions in chaotic systems can be attributed to Poincare; as he explains, “It mayhappen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great onesin the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormouserror in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitousphenomenon.”19

So, working from a strictly Newtonian perspective, one can obtain math-ematical chaos—a complex, beautiful, but unpredictable phenomenon—sim-ply by moving from two to three celestial bodies. Such may be the result ofconsidering the human experience in treatments of science and religion. Bythe human experience, we mean the unfolding of human life in its historical,political, geographical, psychological, and other contexts. Just as the three-body



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problem grants each of its entities de facto validity in exerting a “pull” on theothers, so in considering science, religion, and the human experience we in-tend to take all three realms seriously and respectfully, and not simply collapseone onto another to produce some ready Newtonian solution. One could, forinstance, conceive of science as pointing to objective reality, but religion assimply a human construct, a projection (as Freud would have it) of childhoodneurosis, something made-up. In this case, there are but two bodies: science(understood more or less as knowledge of reality) and the human experience,of which religion is a part. Or, we could even further simplify the system, anddeclare both science and religion to be human constructs, citing history asample evidence that both have feet of clay. Then we have a system of one body:the human experience.

But we are not seeking a simple solution in bringing the human experienceinto the science-and-religion equation: we are seeking something more faithfulto life. The three-body-problem analogy implies that the realities toward whichscience and religion point, and the forms of human experience in which theyare grounded, may all interrelate in complex and unpredictable ways. Too often,science and religion become a shorthand for physical reality and for God (orthe sacred), as if science were some transparent window onto reality and reli-gion a similarly transparent window onto the realm of the sacred. The oppositeposition is to understand science and religion in terms of their human face.Both have some justification. Yet how can science and religion be a part of thehuman experience, yet transcend it? This is the central question considered indifferent ways by this volume’s essays.

The Essays

These essays derive from a research lecture series that took place at UC SantaBarbara between January 2001 and May 2003, with generous funding providedby the John Templeton Foundation. They have been grouped into four thematicsections: Theory, Cosmos, Life, and Mind. Theory concerns broad ways ofunderstanding science and religion; Cosmos considers the ultimate nature ofthe universe; Life entertains the question of origins so prominent in scienceand religion discussion; and Mind concerns topics running from religiousconcepts to human consciousness. These four themes represent much of thecurrent literature on science and religion; yet the perspective of the humanexperience casts each in a new light.

Theory

The Theory section begins with a brilliant essay by Bruno Latour, which aimsto subvert typical assumptions about science and religion as a necessary pref-


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ace to rethinking their relationship. Latour likens religion to love as a perfor-mative (versus merely referential) manner of speech that brings immediacy,not the distant God as is generally assumed; and he similarly flips generalassumptions about science upside down in arguing that science is concernednot with the immediate stuff of life but with largely invisible worlds (the sup-posed domain of religion). Latour then addresses representation in science andreligion, suggesting that science is not a simplistic matter of correspondingwords to world, but an unending process of cascading chains of transformationby which matter becomes form. Latour also critiques the traditional notion ofreligious images as pointing toward the invisible and not being sacred in them-selves. Rather, he argues that religious images work to distort and confusegeneral notions of direct apprehension of the distant and invisible, thus placinga reemphasis on the immediate, a (literal) re-presentation. In both cases, then,Latour argues for a dynamic notion of truth, cautioning against “freeze-framing” truth as either a static world of scientific reference or a static incar-nation of the sacred in historical time.

The next essay, by Thomas Carlson, similarly questions common assump-tions about science and religion. Carlson notes the intimate and practicallyinseparable connection between science and technology, arguing how “techno-science” is involved in producing not only knowledge of the world but also asense of what it means to be human. This sense of humanness involves aconnection of techno-science, and modernity in general, with the mysticalrealm usually associated with religion. Techno-science generally is understoodprecisely in the opposite sense as eliminating ignorance, of knowing (and mas-tering) all. Building upon the work of Weber and Heidegger, Carlson arguesthat this “will to mastery” is framed in the positing of an objective reality thatthe knowing subject masters, based on the certainty of the knowing subject asframed historically in Protestant theology and the philosophy of Descartes. Yet,given the inaccessibility of much of the actual process of techno-science tomost people, there is an important component of faith: Carlson cites the ar-gument of Derrida that any authority is hence grounded on a “mystical foun-dation.” Indeed, similar to mystical systems of old, the aim of techno-sciencebecomes to transcend time and space and attain a position of omniscience,much in the way that navigating the World Wide Web renders one everywhereand nowhere at once. Carlson emphasizes that this act of human self-creationis based on an essential un-knowing of oneself, in particular one’s destiny. Theresult, via our participation in increasingly powerful networks of knowledgeand power, is a type of omniscience without comprehension of where we areheading—a sense of the human experience as conveying not finitude but in-finitude, instability.

Where Latour and Carlson took science and religion as their point of de-parture, Hilary Putnam’s essay focuses on the dimension of human experi-



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ence. Putnam seeks to dispense with the shallow notion of experience (includ-ing, but not limited to, religious experience) as something utterly reduced tosensations. He does so by carefully comparing the shallow Humean conceptionof experience, based on impressions or “pictures” formed on the senses, to theKantian conception, which combines perception and conceptual ideas in acontinuous self which fuses these experiences over time. Putnam then extendsthis Kantian notion of experience to discuss Kant’s aesthetic argument con-cerning “indeterminate concepts,” those that both involve and extend the cre-ative imagination. Putnam applies Kant’s treatment of indeterminacy to mo-rality as a means of suggesting its relevance to religious experience. He alsoextends this notion to science, arguing that the technological and aestheticprocess of scientific knowledge production is far more complex than a sense-data view would suggest. Putnam then returns to religious experience, specif-ically the problem of skepticism, which may seem to result from a rejection ofimmediate sense-impression and an embrace of indeterminacy. He discussesseveral responses, ultimately siding with the existentialist approach, whichstresses a responsibility to live (and hence make choices) despite what cannotbe fully proven following “reasonable” means. Putnam concludes by notingthe symmetry between atheists and fundamentalists, because for both groupsreligious belief (or nonbelief ) is obvious; this obviousness, in his mind, betraysa simplistic notion of experience, again pointing to the centrality of rethinkinghuman experience prior to deep consideration of science and religion.

In the final essay of this section, Jim Proctor considers science and religionas major institutions of epistemic and moral authority. Proctor argues thatauthority is at the heart of most discussions related to science and religion,given the ways these discussions generally compare their authoritative claims.Both the ideological means by which scientific and religious authority are con-structed and defended, and the different patterns of trust in authority amongordinary individuals and communities, are relevant to understanding scienceand religion. In the former case, a common tendency is to elide the humannessof scientific and religious institutions and base their authority on some notionof objectivity or transparency, such that science points directly to reality, andreligion to God (or the sacred). This claim, however, ignores the ways both arefully enmeshed in the human experience. In the case of peoples’ differing trustof authority, Proctor refers to his recent survey and interviews of adult Amer-icans regarding their trust in four major domains of authority: science, religion,nature, and the state. The results suggest two primary models of authority thatAmericans decide whether or not to trust: theocracy, with God (religion) as theultimate authority and the state as the mediating human authority; and ecology,with nature as the ultimate authority and science as the mediating humanauthority. Though problems exist in both of these models, Proctor notes thatsome measure of trust in authority is unavoidable—and, as representing a


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commitment to life, potentially beneficial as well. Proctor ultimately arguesthat both commitment and critique must be present if trust in authority is tolead to meaningful epistemological and moral guidance in our lives.

Cosmos

The section on Cosmos begins with an essay by Jeffrey Russell. Russell com-mences by distinguishing between universe and cosmos, the human under-standing of the universe. Cosmos etymologically implies order and purpose,in contrast to chaos; to Russell, both science and religion are concerned withcosmos or meaning. Yet cosmos, Russell claims, is seriously fragmented inmodern times; he proposes an exploration of history and metaphor to healcosmos. The history of concepts allows one a cultural memory to considerworldviews or notions of cosmos distant in space and time. Augustine under-stood that God’s creation of the universe was a creation of meaning (cosmos),as well as substance, and biblical truths were understood in a symbolic as wellas overt sense. Dante’s Paradiso culminated this rich tradition of cosmos; yetby the sixteenth century religious reformation led to an overemphasis on literaltruth and a deemphasis on symbolism. Thus began the decline of meaningfulcosmos, of conflation of cosmos with universe, suggested in the infamousGalileo affair. With the growth of a concept of science in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, the reduction of cosmos to universe was secured. Theloss of cosmos can, however, be healed by considering the importance of meta-phor. Metaphor opens up, versus closing down, the meaning of reality. Russellintroduces the term “metaphorical ontology” to suggest how deep meaningsof things—cosmos—can be suggested in language, and claims that the properlanguage of religion is thus metaphor. The healing of cosmos will be aided bymetaphorical ontology as it is enacted through religion, science, and othervistas on the ultimate nature of reality, leading humankind along paths yetunknown.

The next Cosmos essay, by Daniel Matt, considers possible resonancesbetween contemporary physical cosmology and the kabbalistic tradition of Jew-ish mysticism. Matt begins by suggesting that common views of science andreligion as distinct or separable are themselves limited in not suggesting pos-sibilities for fruitful interaction. Religion, for example, gives science wonder;and science gives religion a view of knowledge as provisional, thus leading tohumility in light of realities such as the nature of God. Matt then recapitulatesthe scientific theory of the big bang, but echoes Jeffrey Russell in bemoaningthe loss of “myth” necessary to give meaning to life. Yet perhaps in the bigbang one can recapture mythic depth and meaning, as the big bang indicatesthat we are made out of the same stuff as all creation; we all come from thecosmic seed. The kabbalistic tradition of Jewish mysticism, for instance, some-times refers to God as nothingness, as a oneness that animates all things.



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Kabbalah and physical cosmology, in fact, make parallel statements as to thesingularity of the origin of the universe and its resultant unfolding. Otherphysical theories such as broken symmetry find kabbalistic parallels, in spiteof their widely differing methodologies, and suggest that science and spiritu-ality are complementary. Ultimately, this fractured world needs mending, ar-gues Matt, and God needs us to mend it. But, as science may contend andkabbalah confirm, this God is no white-haired man in the sky; God is bestunderstood as infinite and hidden, yet as close to us as is our connection withthe big bang.

Harold Oliver closes the Cosmos section with an essay that addresses cos-mos at the level of metaphysics and hearkens back to the Theory section in hisreconception of science and religion. Oliver’s essay focuses on the notion ofcomplementarity between science and religion: Oliver grounds complemen-tarity in relativity theory and quantum theory. More generally, Oliver appealsto metaphysics as the basis for his relational paradigm, reassessing its Aris-totelian legacy, which assumed the subject/object structure of the Greek lan-guage and produced the substantialist thesis that reality ultimately consists ofthings whereas relations between things are accidental. To Oliver, the cosmosis a grand unity of relations, with subject and object, mind and brain, andultimately God and World, existing as derivatives of this fundamental relat-edness. Oliver then proceeds to argue that religious language is not referential,but symbolic of relational reality; it is when this relational reality is reduced toits derivatives that religious language is changed from mythical to referentialdiscourse. In the case of science, Oliver argues that science aims for the mosteconomical way of speaking of the world, versus the rich metaphorical lan-guage of religion. Ultimately, though, religion and science are about the samedomain of human experience. Oliver then considers the question of science,religion, and truth. He cautions against saying that certain scientific theoriesmay be “true,” arguing that it is preferable to consider that well-establishedscientific theories add to our experience of reality. In the case of religion, Olivercautions even more strongly against the subject-object notion of truth, in whichit is seen to refer to the independent existence of an object; religious “truth,”rather, is a realization or experience of relational reality.

Life

The third section, Life, consists of three essays which present different inter-pretations of Darwin and evolutionary theory, one of the most central topicsin the study of science and religion. The section is launched with an essay byhistorian John Hedley Brooke, who focuses on the idea of the unity of nature,which has been important in both scientific and religious discourse. Brookenotes that the unity of nature thesis, so central to Christian theology, was notsimply an epistemological assertion, but one that was intended to demonstrate


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the beauty of God and creation. In the case of Darwin, the unity of naturethesis would seem to pose a threat to his religious belief, as a naturalisticexplanation of the origin of life would leave no need for God. Yet Brooke notesthat Darwin’s personal beliefs about God were complex, arguing that it wasultimately a series of incidents, both personally experienced and impersonallywitnessed, which led Darwin to thoroughly question the idea of God as a car-ing, guiding Creator. Darwin’s own theory of evolution did not seem to upholdany tidy unity of nature—since nature competes against itself in a struggle forexistence!—and among some Christian leaders it had similarly challengingimplications as well. But what greater unification could be imagined than Dar-win’s theory? In particular, his inclination toward the view that all of life hadbeen derived from a single proto-life form suggests his striving toward unifi-cation. Brooke concludes by noting the important political ends to which theunity of nature thesis has been applied after Darwin, suggesting that it couldremain as a meeting-ground between science and religion.

Michael Ruse’s essay examines, and ultimately dispenses with, philosoph-ical arguments that claim Darwinism leads to the rejection of religious belief.Ruse considers the arguments of three scholars who maintain that there is,indeed, a contradiction between Darwinism and religion. The first is ento-mologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson. Wilson, Ruse argues, is quitesympathetic to religion as an ethical system, yet maintains that its existencecan be explained on evolutionary grounds. Yet Wilson considers religion to bea necessary illusion, hardly true in its own right. In the second case, Ruseconsiders biologist Richard Dawkins, who argues that, until Darwin, no onecould reasonably dismiss the “God hypothesis” of design. Ruse considers thethesis, popular among early Christian Darwinians, that God designed lifethrough the process of evolution. One problem with this thesis is the veryrandom, seemingly undesigned nature of evolution; yet Dawkins himself isnot worried by random variation. As his third example, Ruse considers his ownargument that the biblical injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself doesnot seem to be based on biological fitness, as much as on a near-neighbor formof love. Yet Ruse counters himself by arguing that perhaps Jesus’ injunctiondid not admonish one to love everyone equally; alternatively, Christianity couldbe reaching out to extend a system of morality that biology has attuned to onlynear-neighbor forms of concern. Ultimately, Ruse argues that the conflict be-tween Darwinism and religion was initiated for social and political, not sci-entific, reasons, and though challenges still exist in reconciling the two view-points, there is no necessary contradiction.

Ronald Numbers’ essay also examines Darwinian theory and religious be-lief, but takes a different tack from that of the philosopher Ruse, examining insome detail a range of positions people have adopted in coming to personalterms with evolution. Numbers focuses on four individuals, all from the UnitedStates with scientific backgrounds, who struggled with reconciling evolutionary



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theory and theistic faith. He begins with Joseph LeConte, well-known in thelate nineteenth century for his efforts at harmonizing theism and evolution.LeConte’s deep personal struggles over the loss of a two-year-old daughter andhis rejection of the atheistic “dragon of materialism” formed a powerful emo-tional thrust toward an espousal of evolution that avoided materialism, sup-ported the hope of immortality, and maintained a resolute if not altogethertraditional theism. Numbers’ second and third examples, J. Peter Lesley andGeorge Frederick Wright, both were trained in geology and had deep religiousbackgrounds; both also accepted modified forms of Darwinism yet rejectedfull-bore evolutionary thought. Lesley’s and Wright’s beliefs are understand-able via life events and quite different forms of engagement with Christianity,Lesley rejecting much of it though not in turn embracing evolution, and Wrightgrowing more fundamentalist with time. His final example, early–twentieth-century creationist George McCready Price, found personal and professionalsatisfaction in well-publicized rejections of evolution. Numbers candidly re-counts his own life story, in which an emotional crisis, precipitated in part bya reconsideration of evolutionary theory, eventually led to his rejection of afundamentalist upbringing. Numbers closes by reiterating his belief that “feel-ings count—often more than facts” and suggests that this is why so manyAmericans continue to call themselves creationists rather than evolutionists.

Mind

The fourth section, Mind, begins with an essay by Pascal Boyer, who followsup on the spirit of the preceding section by providing an evolutionary expla-nation of religion, in particular religious mental concepts. The human “mind-brain,” Boyer argues, consists of multiple systems that guide understandingand action in different realms; though none of these systems are specific toreligion, several may be connected to religious concepts, and some conceptsmay be more successful at cultural transmission via these systems than others.The first important feature of religious concepts to Boyer is that they are su-pernatural concepts, defined by their violation of some, but not all, normaldomain-level expectations. Boyer then further clarifies that religious conceptstend to build on our templates of persons, yet emphasize their intentionalagency, which can be evolutionarily explained either in terms of the mind-brain’s need to understand the complex social interactions characteristic ofhumans, or as an asset in predator-prey interactions. Religious concepts arealso about social interaction; yet, in contrast to ordinary people, supernaturalagents have “perfect access” to all strategic (socially relevant) information rel-evant to a given social situation. Boyer cites research that suggests people whobelieve in the Christian God combine features of omniscience with a human-like mind; for instance, one must pray in order for God to hear you. Finally,Boyer argues that religious concepts prey upon common intuitions about mis-


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fortune: gods that do not matter much to peoples’ daily lives, no matter howpowerful they are otherwise, are not that religiously important. These conceptsfocus not on how, but why, the supernatural agents cause misfortune, thereason tracing back to some mishap of social interaction with these agents.

The section continues with an essay by Evan Thompson, who considersempathy as a central feature of the human experience, one which grounds bothscience and religion. Thompson draws upon cognitive science, contemplativepsychology, and phenomenological philosophy in considering empathy the dy-namic coupling of self and other, as a basic intersubjective dimension thatprecludes the distinction of inner and outer realities. Phenomenological in-quiry suggests four aspects to empathy: involuntary coupling of self and other,imaginary transposition of oneself to the place of the other, interpretation ofoneself as Other to the other and vice versa, and moral perception of other asperson. These capacities exist wholly or in part in specific instances; all of theseelements are found in human developmental psychology and come togetherin the lived bodily experience and via language. Thompson then turns to Bud-dhist contemplative psychology as a means of discussing implications for non-duality of self and other. Thompson analyzes the eighth-century Way of theBodhisattva, which argues that notions of “self ” and “other” have no indepen-dent existence, but are conceptually-based; Buddhism, as a middle way, nego-tiates between the conventional truth that we have bounded selves and theultimate truth that self has no bounds. Thompson finally turns to considerimplications for cognitive science, arguing that it tends to rely on third-persontheories and models, whereas for Thompson, the very fact of experience sug-gests the importance of adding first-person models to develop scientific ac-counts of consciousness. These first-person methods not only provideauthentic experience, but trained, disciplined first-person methods afford thekind of reflective distancing necessary to process the complex set of interac-tions that intersubjective experience affords.

In the third essay of this section, Anne Harrington explores the overlapbetween faith and science in the context of medicine. Does the mind, or dohigher powers accessed by the mind, have power to heal the body? Harringtonconsiders four related claims, all offering some scientific validation. The firstis that participation in religious services is good for one’s health, which canapparently be explained only in part by religious communities serving as high-quality social networks. The second is that meditation reduces physical stressand aids healing, whether or not the meditator has any knowledge of or con-nection with a religious tradition. The third, larger claim is that religious beliefof any sort can heal the body; this claim has strong roots in American religioushistory, but seems to derive more from the belief that the mind has innatehealing capacities, rather than that healing comes from any sort of divinepower. The fourth claim, in contrast, is that prayer conveys healing benefits,whether or not it is the patient or an intercessor who prays. This fourth claim



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is bolstered by certain controversial studies and differs from the other three inits implicit support for divine power, and thus divinity, whereas the other claimsare exceedingly pragmatic in their overtones: religion is important because itworks. All four claims, however, are somewhat distinct, and hardly form acoherent package. Overall, Harrington is concerned with the broad assertionthat religion heals the body, due to its insistence that science has providedconclusive proof, as well as its utilitarian emphasis on medicinal therapy versusany other benefits conveyed by religion. To Harrington, what may result is notthe spiritualization of medicine, but the medicalization of religion.

The final essay is by Alan Wallace and revisits the Theory section whileconnecting it with Mind. Wallace aims to present an alternative to metaphysicalrealism on the one hand, and to relativism and constructivism on the other,by exploring the possibility of intersubjective truth in science and religion.Wallace gives a summary of objectivism, the view that there is a world separatefrom human perceptions and concepts. As scientific naturalism proceeded tobuild knowledge of the objective world, religion recoiled against this natural-ism as insufficient to account for God or the soul, thus maintaining a sort ofmind/matter dualism. Wallace argues that the science of mental phenomenahas been largely speculative and not systematically empirical, due in large partto the strong emphasis of science on external phenomena. Thus contemporarycognitive science focuses on the mechanics of mental phenomena, instead ofthe dynamics of the mind. Wallace discusses the pioneering work of WilliamJames, suggesting that science could consider the ways that brain and mindinfluence each other rather than taking mind to be simply an outcome of brainprocesses. He asserts that science works with the world of experience, not aworld independent of human experience. Yet truth-claims can be organizedaccording to their intersubjective invariance across multiple frames ofexperience-based reference. Wallace then discusses how one may validate sci-entific and religious claims made by those who are highly trained and haveopportunities for extraordinary experiences of consciousness—those that out-siders cannot share nor perhaps understand. Yet both apply intersubjectiveempirical and pragmatic criteria to determine the utility of their truths. Wallacecloses with a quote by William James that asserts the need for an empiricismof religious experience.

The Upshot: Between One and Two

Fourteen essays, each with a particular take on science, religion, and the hu-man experience. Is there any overarching message one can bring home fromthese essays? To offer a tidy package to the reader would cheapen these greatthinkers and their diverse thoughts: read the essays for yourself and see whatyou get from them.


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But there may be some broad lesson we can gain by bringing the humanexperience into our discussions of science and religion. On one level, thesediscussions are simply about how scientific and religious people could getalong, which is an important problem to resolve. But on a deeper level, scienceand religion have served as semiotic representatives, as binary code wordspointing to longstanding philosophical tensions between the Great Domainsof matter and spirit, truth and meaning, fact and value, transcendence andimmanence, autonomy and constructedness, nature and culture. As suggestedearlier, positions typically taken on science and religion concern not only sci-ence and religion, but also these Great Domains. Of course the easiest solu-tions are to either separate these Domains (and science and religion) or tounify them: dualism and monism are thus unsurprisingly popular options.But, just as Poincare suggests how a third body forever disrupts any tidy so-lution to two-body planetary motion, here the human experience forever dis-rupts these two tidy solutions to the relationship between science and religion.

So have we simply made things more complex? Yes, but that is not all:indeed, many of the essays in this volume suggest an alternative approach toscience and religion as informed by the human experience. A classic formu-lation of this approach is the earlytwentieth-century work of Alfred NorthWhitehead. Whitehead, a brilliant mathematician-turned-metaphysician, washimself quite interested in science and religion: as he states, “When we con-sider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggerationto say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of thisgeneration as to the relations between them.”20

Whitehead’s seminal contribution, one that resonates with many of theessays in this volume, amounts to a fundamental reexamination of the GreatDomains that science and religion are assumed to signify, whether as separate(following conciliatory dualism) or unified (following convergent monism).What Whitehead suggests is that underlying these Great Domains is a sup-posed substratum of two substances, Object and Subject, a belief in “the con-cept of matter as the substance whose attributes we perceive. . . . Namely weconceive ourselves as perceiving attributes of things, and bits of matter are thethings whose attributes we perceive.”21

This is known as Whitehead’s account of the bifurcation of nature:

What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of natureinto . . . two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in aware-ness and the nature which is the cause of awareness. The naturewhich is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it thegreenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun,the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The naturewhich is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of mole-



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cules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce theawareness of apparent nature.22

How is this bifurcation of nature, this fundamental bifurcation underlyingall related bifurcations into Great Domains, bifurcations to which science andreligion rush and declare them either separate but equal or one and the same,how is this bifurcation to be conceptually healed? This is precisely where manyof the essays in our volume make a similar claim to that of Whitehead. AsIsabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour note, Whitehead’s dismissal of the bifur-cation of nature into Object and Subject, primary (real) versus secondary (per-ceived) qualities of things, is supported by (surprise!) none other than ourtrilogy’s third player, the human experience.23A world of human experience isa world that precedes objects and subjects; in other words, object and subjectare derivative of experience. Experience points forward to objects as much asit points backward to subjects; experience thus annuls the hard dichotomybetween subjects and objects, since it is from experience that the very meaningof “subject” and “object” is obtained.

There is much more to human experience, however, than what may appearto be a mere semantic point that it precedes objects and subjects. Significantly,experience is best evidenced in life, far different from the cold substantialistbias in much philosophy. Life is about experiences, not primarily about sub-stances, and certainly not primarily about some Great Domains of reality andperception that categorically exclude the possibility of life. Latour summarizesWhitehead’s argument, and Stengers’ commentary, thus:

The modernist philosophy of science implies a bifurcation of naturebetween primary and secondary qualities; however, if nature had re-ally bifurcated, no living organism would be possible given that be-ing an organism implies to ceaselessly blur the difference betweenprimary and secondary qualities. Since we are organisms sur-rounded by many other organisms, nature has not bifurcated.24

Or, as Latour remarks, “an organism can’t learn anything from the bifur-cation of nature except that it should not exist. In that sense, philosophies thataccept the bifurcation of nature are so many death-warrants.”25

Important implications follow for Latour and Stengers concerning scienceand religion. For starters, science is no longer trapped in subjectivist skepti-cism—though certainly naıve empiricism is gone too, following the demise ofthe object-world. Another, perhaps more startling implication, is that White-head’s argument for the necessity of God is not something to be convenientlyexcised, but plays a well-deserved role in his new cosmology. Though Latourreminds us that “[Whitehead’s] God is there to solve very precisely a technicalproblem of philosophy not of belief,”26 and though the involved explications


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Latour and Stengers provide of Whitehead’s extremely involved account of Godare, perhaps unsurprisingly, dense, the broad point is unmistakable: science,religion, and the human experience are each refashioned, then each upheldand respected in a manner that denies anything fundamental to the Procrus-tean beds of Object and Subject, on which their living limbs are so oftenlopped off.

One way of putting Whitehead’s philosophy in different terms is that,given its emphasis on process and experience, it finds relations to be morefundamental than things. This is a theme you will find in many contributionsto this volume. “Relationality,” “complementarity,” “intersubjectivity,” “experi-ence”: these are different terms than monism—we are not solving the problemof Two by retreating to the simple world of One. By bringing the human ex-perience into science and religion, we have not so much gone from two tothree or two to one, but rather have found a point somewhere between oneand two, somewhere between the denial of difference (and hence the possibilityof relation) that so bedevils monism and the metaphysical gap that definesdualism.

If there is no inherent subject, no object, but only as derivative of therelational human experience, then one can answer the central question of thisvolume, “Are science and religion a part of, or apart from, the human experi-ence?” by eliminating a priori the subjectivist and objectivist options. The na-ture of human experience suggests that no longer can science or religion bedismissed as subjective constructions, nor can they be exalted as conduits fordirect access to the objective reality of the universe and/or God. Yet we couldequally say that the relationship between science, religion, and the humanexperience is a curious one in which both the subjectivist and the objectivistpositions are upheld. Science and religion are both fully human enterprises,yet illuminate—however dimly at times—a reality that transcends human un-derstanding.

The relational character of the worlds of human experience revealed byscience and religion, then, is perhaps unavoidably expressed in conventionalsubject/object language as paradox, an admission of two seemingly contradic-tory truths. Science and religion as neither subjective nor objective, or in an-other way of speaking, as both subjective and objective. How can they be bothsubjective and objective? How can they be both and be neither at the sametime? A multilayered paradox indeed. Yet the deepest human truths by whichwe live are the same: these truths can be fully historical products of a givenculture in a given location and yet somehow provide brilliant glimpses of ourultimate realities. Paradox is much harder to grasp than a simple dualist state-ment that science is this, religion is that, or the monist assertion that scienceand religion are ultimately one and the same. But paradox, that elusive spacesomewhere between one and two, is certainly a part of our human experience



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of life. And how could we expect anything less in the relationship betweenscience and religion?

notes

1. This statement from Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Barg-mann (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1954), 46. Einstein invoked several formu-lations of the relationship between science and religion, of which this is but one. Inanother passage, for instance, Einstein adopts the historical argument that “While itis true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral consid-erations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of sci-ence were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe ofours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge”; seeEinstein, Ideas and Opinions, 52.

2. Ibid., 44.3. Ibid., 41–42.4. Ibid., 42.5. Barbour’s taxonomy is most recently presented in scholarly format in Ian G.

Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco:HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), and used as an organizing framework for Ian G. Bar-bour, When Science Meets Religion (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000).

6. See Geoffrey Cantor and Chris Kenny, “Barbour’s Fourfold Way: Problemswith His Taxonomy of Science-Religion Relationships,” Zygon 36.4 (2001): 765–781.Barbour’s reply is found in Ian G. Barbour, “Response: Ian Barbour on Typologies,”Zygon 37.2 (2002): 345–359. For other critiques of Barbour, see, e.g., William A. Stahl,Robert A. Campbell, Yvonne Petry, and Gary Diver, Webs of Reality: Social Perspectiveson Science and Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Wil-lem B. Drees, Religion, Science, and Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996).

7. See Drees, Religion, Science, and Naturalism.8. See, e.g., Harold H. Oliver, “The Complementarity of Theology and Cosmol-

ogy,” Zygon 13.1 (1978): 19–33, where he discusses “conflict” (one-domain) and “com-partment” (two-domain) positions as a preliminary to his argument on complemen-tarity. See also Oliver’s essay in this volume.

9. See John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives,Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 33ff,for a discussion of these and other historical publications supporting the conflictthesis.

10. See, for instance, Robert T. Pennock, Intelligent Design Creationism and ItsCritics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 2001); Michael Ruse, The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates (Santa Bar-bara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000).

11. Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Betrayal of Science and Reason: HowAnti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future (Washington, D.C.: Island Press,1996), 25.


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12. Prince Charles, Millenium Reith Lecture, April-May 2000. Available onlineat http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/lecture6.stm.

13. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life,The Library of Contemporary Thought (New York: Ballantine Publishing Group,1999).

14. Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion(New York: Random House, 1998), xii.

15. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936).

16. P.C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 16.

17. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Mod-ern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975).

18. I am grateful to Walter Kohn for suggesting this analogy.19. Henri Poincare, Science and Method, trans. Francis Maitland (New York: Do-

ver Publications, Inc., 1952), 68.20. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmil-

lan, 1925), 260.21. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature: Tarrner Lectures Delivered in

Trinity College, November, 1919 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1920), 26.22. Ibid., 30–31.23. Isabelle Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage creation de con-

cepts (Paris: Gallimard, 2002); Bruno Latour, “What Is Given in Experience? A Reviewof Isabelle Stengers’ Penser avec Whitehead : Une libre et sauvage creation de con-cepts,” to appear in Boundary 2 (2004).

24. Latour, “What Is Given in Experience?”25. Ibid.26. Ibid.

bibliography

Barbour, Ian G. Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. San Francisco:HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

———. “Response: Ian Barbour on Typologies.” Zygon 37.2 (2002): 345–359.———. When Science Meets Religion. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000.Brooke, John Hedley. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge

History of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.Cantor, Geoffrey, and Chris Kenny. “Barbour’s Fourfold Way: Problems with His Tax-

onomy of Science-Religion Relationships.” Zygon 36.4 (2001): 765–781.Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics

and Eastern Mysticism. Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975.Davies, P. C. W. The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World. New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1992.Drees, Willem B. Religion, Science, and Naturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1996.



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Ehrlich, Paul R., and Anne H. Ehrlich. Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future. Washington, D.C.: Island Press,1996.

Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. Trans. Sonja Bargmann. New York: Crown Pub-lishers, Inc., 1954.

Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. The Li-brary of Contemporary Thought. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1999.

Latour, Bruno. “What Is Given in Experience? A Review of Isabelle Stengers’ Penseravec Whitehead : Une libre et sauvage creation de concepts.” To appear in Boundary2 (2004).

Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 1936.

Oliver, Harold H. “The Complementarity of Theology and Cosmology.” Zygon 13.1(1978): 19–33.

Pennock, Robert T. Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theologi-cal, and Scientific Perspectives. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Poincare, Henri. Science and Method. Trans. Francis Maitland. New York: DoverPublications, Inc., 1952.

Ruse, Michael. The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000.

Stahl, William A., et al. Webs of Reality: Social Perspectives on Science and Religion. NewBrunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Stengers, Isabelle. Penser avec whitehead: Une libre et sauvage creation de concepts. Paris:Gallimard, 2002.

Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature, Tarrner Lectures Delivered in TrinityCollege, November, 1919. Cambridge: The University Press, 1920.

———. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan, 1925.Wilber, Ken. The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion. New

York: Random House, 1998.

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